ATi Mobility Radeon 9700

Name: ATi Mobility Radeon 9700 - Page 5
Brand: ATi

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, May 24, 2004, 04:00 PM EDT

Performance Comparisons With Aquamark 3

DX8 and DX9 Shaders

Aquamark 3

Aquamark 3 comes to us by way of Massive Development. Massive's release of the original Aquanox in 1999 wasn't very well received by the gaming community, but it was one of the first games to implement DX8 class shaders, which led to the creation of Aquamark 2 - a benchmark previously used by many analysts. Since the Aquamark benchmarks are based on an actual game engine, they must support old and new video cards alike. Thus, the latest version of Aquamark, Aquamark 3, utilizes not only DirectX 9 class shaders, but DirectX 8 and DirectX 7 as well. We ran this benchmark at resolutions of 1024x768 and 1600x1200 with no anti-aliasing and then again with 4X anti-aliasing enabled. 4X Anisotropic filtering was enabled throughout.

As expected, the 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro held onto some big leads in the Aquamark 3 tests, with the Radeon 9600 XT and Mobility Radeon 9700 battling it out for second place. Once again though, the Mobility Radeon 9700 was outperformed by Radeon 9600 XT by some significant margins. At 1600x1200 with 4X anti-aliasing enabled, for example, the Radeon 9600 XT outpaced the Mobility 9700 by over 44%.

Tags: ATI, Radeon, Mobility, ATI Mobility, Mobility Radeon

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com